Kevin Pask. The Fairy Way of Writing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. 177 pp. On Kevin Pask's showing, way of was a Restoration-era invention. People were certainly aware of fairies in before the late seventeenth century. Notably, for English readers, that would have meant in Shakespeare's works, but it took the efforts of Joseph Addison, John Dryden, and (from a negative standpoint) Jeremy Collier to constitute writing as a distinct, momentous way or kind of writing rather than just as an occasional literary conceit. Since, I would guess, most modern readers, even in the academy, still adhere to the occasional conceit view of writing, Pask's book will surely be eye opening. On one hand, Pask enables us to survey English literary history from the vantage point of the authors mentioned above, while on the other hand he invites us to recognize the critical value of the hypothesis that the fairy way of has been a sustained enterprise since Shakespeare and one, moreover, that has contributed more than its share to the constitution of an English national literature. I would say Pask makes his point, and then some. (Pask distinguishes usefully between English writing and the French literary tale of the seventeenth century [by writers like Charles Perrault and Mme. d'Aulnoy], a form popular among readers in English translation but precluded by its materials from assimilation into high French neoclassical literature.) For Addison, Dryden, and their contemporaries the way of writing was most strongly exemplified by and, indeed, practically inaugurated by Shakespeare. Needless to say, A Midsummer Night's Dream showed the way but so, more surprisingly, did The Tempest, especially the figure of Caliban, whom we would now hardly associate with fairies. Caliban counted, however, because Restoration and eighteenth-century criticism defined the way of writing as writing for which, in the last resort, there were no real-world models. As Addison wrote, There is a kind of writing, wherein the poet quite loses sight of nature, and entertains his reader's with the Characters and Actions of such persons as have many of them no existence, but what he bestows on them. Such are Fairies, Witches, Magicians, Demons, and Departed Spirits (Pask 1). This listing practically comprises the cast of The Tempest, including not only Caliban and Ariel but also Prospero (who does, after all, channel the witch Medea) and the absent Sycorax. The inventors of the term regarded the ability to succeed in the way of writing as the strongest evidence of imaginative power. It was the distinctive token of Shakespeare's preeminence. Although imaginative power and writing may have been loosely associated before Dryden and Addison, it was they who decisively forged the link, at the same time explicitly promoting the value of imagination. According to Pask, Locke, Leibniz, and others created the epistemological conditions under which the as a cognitive faculty could acquire a more elevated status than it had previously enjoyed, for example in the anti-imaginative writings of Shakespeare's contemporary Francis Bacon (this book lends a new piquancy to the thesis that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays). The philosophical empowerment of the at once facilitated and coincided with its literary empowerment, decisively heralding the emergence of literature (English literature). In longstanding English usage, and fantasy were practically synonymous, and so they remained at least until Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, drove a wedge between superior works of the primary imagination and inferior works of fancy That distinction is with us yet in our distinction between (serious) and fantasy, the latter represented in Pask's book mainly by the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkein. One important accomplishment of Pask's book is to effect a qualified rapprochement between literature and fantasy, with their normally distinct readerships and market segments. …
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Mar 23, 2023
Anh-Thu Nguyen + 5
